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Unisys Helps Oracle, Microsoft Team Up - InternetNews.
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Unisys Helps Oracle, Microsoft Team Up

By Michael Singer   |    December 06, 2004
Page 1 of 1

Much to the delight of joint customers, Unisys is playing peacemaker between rivals Oracle and Microsoft.

Engineers from Unisys and Oracle are now working together to make sure Oracle applications can run on Windows-based systems, the companies said Monday.

The Unisys, Oracle partnership is expected to certify the latest applications and hardware including Oracle 10g running on Unisys servers with Microsoft's Windows Server 2003. Oracle said it has already tested some of the developments in its laboratories.

The historical bickering between the two software rivals is legendary. Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison once said the only things worth anything at Microsoft are the IE browser, Microsoft Office and some games. Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, was quick to point out that Oracle's programs like NC and "Raw Iron" are yet more examples of a company behind the times.

Researchers said they were able to model the enhancements on a Unisys ES7000 server powered by Intel Itanium 2 processors. And in one case they claimed to have broken some old benchmarks on a Unisys ES7000 Aries 420 Enterprise Server with 16 Intel Itanium 2 1.5 GHz processors on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter 64-bit Edition, Oracle Database 10g with Oracle Automatic Storage Management.

"The ability to maintain and integrate Oracle applications with enterprise Windows-based systems means that IT managers are no longer locked into particular configurations and application sets," Donald Montgomery, a director of strategic programs at Unisys said in a statement.

Partners are also convinced that Oracle is doing the right thing. Wetherill Associates (WAI), Calgary Co-operative Association Limited and the Nevada Department of Public Safety, which are participating in the study, chose Unisys and Oracle to run on Windows.

Wetherill, for example, said it needed to consolidate operations as it approached an acquisition and decided to move from three Sun Unix-based servers onto two Unisys ES7000s. The company needed to power its Baan ERP software, running Oracle's 9I database. As a result, WAI got improvements as much as 400 percent on certain applications over its old Sun system.

"Customers like Wetherill are searching for more cost effective, non-RISC solutions to support their mission critical applications -- solutions that will elegantly support their existing software architectures," Montgomery said.

Oracle and Unisys said they would hold seminars for customers around the world to demonstrate the ease of migrating Oracle implementations to Intel-based systems.